Even without Trump's lawsuit, California may have to abandon sanctuary policies. By Nolan Rappaport

In his first week as president, Trump signed an Executive Order which directed the withholding of federal funds, except as mandated by law, from sanctuary jurisdictions that prevent their police or other local entities from exchanging immigration status information with ICE.

When Trump tried to implement this policy in California, a federal judge held in a preliminary decision that the directive was unconstitutional. A permanent injunction was ordered on November 20, 2017.

California raised the sanctuary controversy with Trump to a new level by enacting three sanctuary laws. The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on March 6, 2018, to invalidate these laws.

The federal courts in California are in the Ninth Circuit, and I don’t think Trump can prevail with an immigration issue related to one of his executive orders in that circuit.

But that won’t stop Trump. He can appeal to the Supreme Court. And the presence of so many undocumented aliens in California makes it easy to predict what he will do next if he fails with the lawsuit.

Nolan Rappaport was detailed to the House Judiciary Committee as an executive branch immigration law expert for three years; he subsequently served as an immigration counsel for the Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Claims for four years. Prior to working on the Judiciary Committee, he wrote decisions for the Board of Immigration Appeals for 20 years.

Comments

For some of my thoughts on how the Trump administration's actions against non-white mainly Latin American immigrants in California fit in a with a larger pattern of activity against Middle Eastern and African immigrants in Europe (with some old-fashioned antisemitism, which is never far below the surface in Europe, thrown in), and plans by Israel to deport thousands of dark-skinned immigrants back to the same African continent from which the people of Israel escaped to the Promised Land during the Exodus from Egypt, see:

The DOJ's lawsuit against California over "sanctuary" policies is not the only major lawsuit to be filed in a California federal court this week underscoring the fundamental cruelty and lack of humanity in Trump's attempts to expel non-white immigrants from the US.

The ACLU has now (on March 9) filed a national class action suit on the District Court for the Southern District of California challenging the appalling DHS practice of separating asylum-seeking parents and children in different detention facilities which in some cases are thousands of miles apart.

Nolan seems to be unable to accept the common subject matter between my comments and his. If he wants to write an article about DOJ anti-immigrant activities in California, do readers such as myself not also have the right to mention related issues, even if my opinions differ in some respects from Nolan's?

Or are ilw.com comment spaces only available for people who agree with Nolan on these issues?

Roger Algase
Attorney at Law

PS: My blogs are well worth reading, too! Readers are cordially invited to check them out to get a different perspective from Nolan's on the same topics(or related ones) that he is offering his own views about.

However, readers should by no means stop at only reading my comments. They should also read articles such as the March 9 one in the Washington Post by Trump's ambassador to Panama, John D. Feely, who has just resigned, in large part as protest against the president's demonizing and scapegoating of non-white immigrants.

This is the same agenda that underlies the administration's actions against California's sanctuary policies which Nolan is writing about.

Much as one might try to slice and dice all these activities in order to create an illusion that they are separate issues, the fact remains that they are all part of an agenda to keep non-white immigrants out, or kick them out, which is not only gaining traction in Donald Trump's America, but in other countries as well.

Readers who are interested in Nolan's above article will also certainly want to read Garrett Epps' thoughtful and incisive analysis of last week's terribly unfortunate Jennings v. Rodriguez 5-3 Supreme Court decision effectively upholding the indefinite detention of asylum-seekers and other unauthorized immigrants in what is becoming the American version of a Soviet-style gulag.

The danger of Trump's mass arrest and deportation dragnet, which is now playing out in California and elsewhere, is not only in its agenda of taking America's immigration system back to the white supremacist pre-1965 regime through mass deportation of Latino, Asian and black immigrants, but in its undermining the Fifth Amendment rights which are at the basis of our democracy itself.